coincidence is weird

case in point: my senior year in high school--a private, church owned school, for those who don't know that already--i took the afternoons off for work study, specifically working just across the street from the school in that same church's editorial department...

for the record, the church was the worldwide church of god, of herbert armstrong, world tomorrow, plain truth, good news fame, and i actually worked for its youth magazine for nearly two years in some capacity or another altogether

...and it should be mentioned one of the associate editors with which i worked (though he happened to be on vacation during the summer before senior year when i started there) also did duty at the high school as a bible teacher (10th grade, proverbs class, if i remember rightly). but anyway, that isn't the coincidence i'm getting to here. a few years earlier (than senior year), probably when i was in 7th or 8th grade, i'd written a short story called blood withdrawal, about a man cursed to be a vampire but a bit depressed and suicidal about it and obsessed with his human daughter (his one link to his mortal life)--very "anne rice" considering i hadn't read any rice yet at the time (hell, i don't think i'd even watched forever knight at that point, don't think it was on the air yet)--and stapled together with a couple supershort stories i'd also written, altogether about a dozen pages to the package, a few copies had been circulating about the school. see, the thing is, by the summer before senior year, those copies were, well, lost to me. i had my own of course, but no one in the school came up to me to comment on having read one anymore, so i figured the circulation was over. so, i interview for the editorial job, get it and start (this a few months before it was my afternoon work study gig), and one of my first days in, the editor of youth magazine comes and drops one of those story packets on my desk, says it was weird but fairly good. me--i barely register what he says cause i'm shocked to a) see one of those packets again and b) have it given me by someone who, when the things were circulating, was a total stranger to me

now, thismorning, at work, there was a few minutes of downtime as the computer network was being reset, so i was looking at the stuff about my desk (aside from the paperwork i use for my work and my backpack and drink, nothing on the desk was put there by me, since i only started back there recently and this desk was a fill in position) and tucked in a little slot with some business cards i find my own lemming drops studio cards, from a few years ago when i was putting out my minicomics, a card that's now out of date (with an old address) and which i'm fairly sure i never gave to my boss--three years ago, i worked for the same place--but of course it's possible i gave her one. but, the weird thing was, in that same stack of cards was a second one of mine. now, i know i never gave lori (my boss) two of my business cards; i mean, why would i? but, there they were

and, that got me thinking about the vampire story anecdote and weird coincidences in general (like, for another personal example, my dad is from pennsylvania, my fourth oldest sister married a guy from pennsylvania, i married a girl from pennsylvania and the youngest of my six sisters has of late been going out with a guy who hails from none other than pennsylvania; or for another exmple, that a recent posted response to one of my blog entries at livejournal was posted by a woman who several years ago now had chance to know of me and dislike me, and i wonder if she's been keeping track of me since then or just happened upon my blog) and well, that had my head in circles while i was doing my data entry, so work wasn't too boring, which was nice